Eddie had positioned them so that the Nomad’s hull blocked the worst of the brutal current, and it was an easy swim over to the wreck. While Mike got busy with a diamond-toothed saw on one of the frame members, Cabrillo managed to ease himself through one of the square openings by first taking off his main tank and pushing it through ahead of himself. Once he had the tank strapped back in place, he swam over the open aft deck, where the ship had once deployed and repaired mines. Now that he was out of the Nomad’s protection, he kept one hand on part of the ship at all times. The cage would prevent him from being carried clear off the ship, but impacting the trusswork, should he slip up, could damage equipment or break bone.

He reached a door that led into the ship’s interior. Before doing anything, he rapped on it with the steel butt of his handheld dive light to test the metal’s strength. Near the edge of the door, the door flaked some, but its integrity seemed good.

“I’m going in,” he announced.

“Roger,” Max said. Standard procedure would have been to have Mike stationed at the door should anything go wrong, but the Chairman’s dive partner was only seconds away.

The passage was a standard hallway, with doors leading left and right. Each room was inky black until Cabrillo swept his light across the walls. It looked as though the ship had been completely stripped as part of her being scrapped. There was no furniture in any of the rooms, and he could tell by the plumbing that toilets and sinks had been removed from the enlisted men’s head.

He came to a stairwell, and his light caught a sudden movement that made him rear back. A silver fish, he had no idea what species, blasted past him in a blur of fins and tail.

“What happened?” a concerned Hanley asked. As bad as it was for Juan, the jerky video wouldn’t have shown what had so startled him.

“Just a fish.” Normally, Juan would have made a lame joke, but communicating humor in a helium-induced falsetto was next to impossible.

He figured that whatever equipment Tesla installed would be on a lower deck rather than up above, near the bridge. He swam down the stairs—really, a steeply canted ladder—and came upon a room where mines had once been stored. Rather than being empty as he’d expected, most of the compartment was taken up by an odd piece of machinery. Juan snapped some pictures with his high-res camera.

“What am I looking at?” Max asked in frustration because of the poor video quality despite the equipment’s expense.

“A machine,” Juan told him. “Never seen anything like it.”